


Are You With Me?

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Music RPF, Steely Dan - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, Humor, Lyric-bombing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22181089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: Strangely, it was easier to be at peace with than before.  There was no uncertainty to it.  He could at least say it would be hislasttime out of personal connection with Walter, because it was all he would know for the rest of his life ...Or, so hethought.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Are You With Me?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JaeNunyah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaeNunyah/gifts).

> Written as a contribution to Ficmas 2019 on Rockfic as a prompt fill for JaeNunyah, who requested ghost Walter Becker aggressively haunting Donald Fagen!
> 
> Includes small cameos of Michael McDonald, Boz Scaggs, and Steve Winwood.

_So much for carrying on with the rest of the tour._

Ten days had passed since Walter Becker had left the living world, and Donald Fagen had now left the road and returned home, sooner than he'd expected. Not unlike he was facing the task of deciding the way forward for Steely Dan on his own sooner than he'd have thought he would just a decade prior -if he'd even expected back then that he would be the one.

Facing the stage fright with The Nightflyers had actually been enjoyable for the first few nights after the news, rather than the dreaded chore it usually was to get past, before he could slip into a zone. Scheduling the first short tour for October with Steely Dan proper hadn't even brought on a distant sense of weariness, knowing the nights that lay ahead. It was worth it -keeping it going already through some of their music incorporated into his solo act, as he'd discussed with Walter decades before, and doing it in his honor. Doing it because that's what he'd have probably wanted.

At least, Donald _hoped._

It _wasn't_ worth landing himself in the hospital over though, and when pneumonia struck and the options were between cancelling and going home, or pushing it and getting dangerously ill, he cut the tour short and went home.

There was a difference between carrying on and being stupid, of course.

The latter of which, Walter would have sneered at as anything but an honor.

Perhaps Walter would have sneered too at the brief dedications of shows in the days after his death, for different reasons. Those hadn't been stupid, nor had they been a dragged-out spectacle on Donald's part. They'd been truthful and what felt right to say, so he had -until it was time to stop them and everything else, landing him in his current place.

_Whatever._ It wasn't his first rodeo with pneumonia, nor was it his first rodeo with living without some occasional connection with Walter. The latter, he was having an easier time with than the previous experience. 

Strangely, it was easier to be at peace with than before. There was no uncertainty to it. He could at least say it would be his _last_ time out of personal connection with Walter, because it was all he would know for the rest of his life.

Or, so he _thought._

The pneumonia was harder to judge. There was no telling if he'd see it again, though with life on the road, he'd be asking too much to never have another encounter. 

It, in itself, wasn't too difficult to deal with if he caught it early enough -if tedious. Antibiotics were first in the line of order, before hunkering down at home to hide from the outside world until the misery passed -hopefully without having to resort to the torture of a hospital trip.

At home, he would attempt to sleep through most of the ordeal while the world passed by -if he could successfully achieve that in an upright position to keep from choking -and if that didn't work out, for better or worse, his mind would find something unconventional to drift and focus itself on.

He planned to start with the latter in hopes it would ease him to the former. Trying to force his way to sleep carried the risk of stirring up old paranoid feelings and exacerbating feverish delirium if it didn't work out within a certain amount of time. Thoughts would distract him from his goal, and the fever would eventually run them together into some incoherent ramble that would lead him off.

Receiving the phone call about Walter had been strangely ..._uneventful._ Even less than what Donald had feared it would be like if Walter went before him.

He'd known it was coming. He could have seen it coming months prior while Walter sat a tour out in treatment. As early as two years prior, there were subtle signs of Walter slowing down, losing interest, and beginning to slip into a low state as he had with the injury decades ago. A low state without the detrimental level of addiction that had come with the previous one, but one he wouldn't live to recover from -and Donald had known it then, soon enough to gently ease through the grieving process as if it had hardly been there. And if Donald hadn't known it was coming as fast as it was coming then, he had no doubt when he'd gotten the phone call to come see Walter in a break between tour dates, mere weeks before the next phone call came.

He'd seen it as the ending of sorts that it was. And of the possible endings to have, it was better than anything his cynical mind could have expected. Sure, Walter had lost track with the clean lifestyle and more positive space he'd worked to achieve in his separation in the 80s -perhaps because none of it was going to change the inevitable end. It wouldn't have been like Walter to fight something that couldn't be changed, only to end up looking pitiful in doing so. He'd resigned to having that end his own way, as his own form of spiteful victory -and death hadn't stopped him from winning that battle.

Even at his weakest, he was undeniably Walter Becker -more than he had been over the last couple of touring years together. Snide, sinister, cynical, and as hysterically funny as he'd ever been going back to their starting-out days in New York.

Had he not been bed-ridden, Donald might not have known the extent of his internal suffering -and still doubted he did, just as much as he never knew all of what the 80s had entailed, for the impairment that at times _did_ make Walter seem like someone other than himself.

The only part of that last meeting that seemed off was that Donald -if of a dry, sardonic kind -had given the last laugh in their final conversation.

Maybe, for all the things that had gone unexpectedly well about it, that had been the inevitable imperfection.

But as much as Walter strove for perfection, he strove to get the last laugh in every case, and it had since led Donald to wonder if Walter had already gotten it when he'd left out his door, or if he'd eventually get it back from him in another lifetime.

Or maybe by some other method which Donald wouldn't psych himself out trying to think up. Which maybe, he'd suspected, was how Walter was often the one half-step ahead that got him to that last laugh.

He didn't know when he'd fallen asleep, but he knew he had, because he was no longer propped up in bed, but sitting on the beat up couch in a vaguely familiar apartment back in Brooklyn.

_"You know, considering some of the horrors of the 80s you've been -how should I say it -surprisingly candid about for you in your recent book, you seem to be holding up pretty well."_

Donald flinched around to find Walter standing behind the couch with a somewhat unclear critical expression as he looked down on him expectantly. He still looked as he had in the last couple of years, and not as he would have decades before in the setting. 

Everything else seemed vivid enough to not seem dream-like though, so he played along for kicks.

_"Just about as well as I'd expect to, I'd say,"_ he quipped back, watching as the all-too-real sinister grin crept across Walter's features. _"Thank GOD."_

_"You nearly had me worried for you. I'm glad to see it wasn't necessary,"_ Walter mused. _"Though perhaps I should be for other reasons. For once you're not so high strung and paranoid; I'm curious to see if some would hardly recognize you."_

_"Why, because I don't have to wonder if you're recovering or if you're dying miles away, and I don't know which one it is?"_

Rare, brutal truth without the filter of twisting sarcasm sprung forward before Donald could stop it. A lingering remnant of haunting fear from the 80s in the strange void that had reformed beside him chipped off the wall and struck the bottom, sending the faintest echo of old pain flashing through his chest for a split second. 

Closing his eyes as it spread up to throb with the ache of fever in his head, he tossed his hands out to the side in the same loose motion from their earliest days together, as though to toss the thought off to the side without care before it could take its hold and wreak old havoc.

_"One already happened, y'know? No reason to worry this time when it's pretty much guaranteed the other's not happening now."_

_"Don't get too sappy,"_ Walter scoffed, before offering a smirk. _"Or is the fever just getting to your head? I suppose I could forgive the latter."_

_"You make me cry, and you'll be glad you're dead and out of my reach. I'd deck you,"_ Donald snorted, just as much serious as he was joking. _"And not before letting you give me hell for it either -fever or not be damned."_

_"It'd only be fair to do so anyway for that rather lengthy dedication you wrote. Not that it surprises me with some of the notes you sent in the past. All of which were rather touching and telling -and miraculously made to work for things that hardly suit you. Though I suppose it's just about been done for me."_ Walter shook his head, keeping his smirk in place even as the rest of his expression took a more rueful light that rarely made an appearance. _"You know my estate managers are going to sue you even if you don't."_

_"Well, the tour's still booked and I'm still going to drag myself onstage every night even if it is torture, so that's too bad for them if they think I'm playing for too long. Wasn't exactly my idea to keep the name the same anyway."_

_"Rather superficial detail to argue over when it's not much different from the last year. Did I miss it being the catalyst to ending the world?"_

Donald rolled his eyes. _"You'd THINK. Just might be -I'll find out onstage. See what the fans think. However much that matters."_

_"Give them a good rant or two for me, why don't you?"_ Walter proposed. _"You'll have help knowing when and who deserves it -though depending on the night, I'd hope you of all people wouldn't need it. You can't use stage fright as an excuse to leave it up to me now, but I'd have to question much of my lifelong judgement if you don't enjoy it."_

_"I'd leave it to you for being more articulate."_ Donald forced the sarcastic start of a laugh and inadvertently kicked off a raucous coughing jag he had to fight against to say every last word. 

_"Now that it's up to ME... I bet I'll get... more of a kick out of THAT... than performing itself."_

Walter chuckled, then stopped abruptly and feigned seriousness.

_"Of course you will,"_ he quipped, before resuming his snide laughter, which began to blend with Donald's coughing a little too much for the waking world. _"Soon enough, of course you will."_

Donald's eyes snapped open and he found himself flat on his back in the fetal position in bed, in full fledged fever sweat. He'd slid down the pillow and into the doomed position that he made fast work of pushing out of once he came back to his senses.

_"I bet you'll have it as second nature against that of all others by the end of those eight shows..."_

This time, not only did the voice sound real, but he was awake. A shadow flashed across the wall behind him too quickly to get a proper look at it while incapacitated, and with all his strength devoted to the involuntary spasm bringing up the fluid from his lungs.

If what Donald had seen through his peripheral vision was correct, it resembled a human figure.

"Walt...?" he managed, against all logic.

No answer. Just an empty room around him, and the sound of dwindling coughs. The shadow was gone just as soon as it had appeared.

_Well, what the fuck did I expect anyway?_

Then as he regained control, he heard the clock at the bottom of the stairs in the downstairs hallway striking loudly. Almost too loudly. While Donald didn't know what time it was, he _did_ know to have later afternoon sun coming in through the slits in the blinds, it shouldn't have struck as many times as he was aware of.

He also didn't know how many times it had struck before he started counting, but once he got to fourteen and realized the clock shouldn't have been striking that much, period, he was freaked out enough to extract himself from his hideout to figure out _what the hell_ that was all about -or at the very least, to make it _stop._

The strike weight was rapidly dropping as he made his way down. It bottomed out with a loud _clunk!_ against the wooden bottom of the mounted frame and the tug at the top of the chain, just as Donald got within two steps of the clock. Leaving him standing in silence before it with a faint echo repeating in his traumatized ears, watching as the pendulum faltered and lost momentum to come to a stop.

He could have left it there. With as lousy as he felt, he would have _liked_ to leave the clock there in its silent state that it was stuck in -so long as nobody messed with it -and crawl back into bed. 

The lingering touch of manageable paranoia that never left him -a curiosity of caution -left him unable to settle for that though. Not until he first knew what broke. What made the clock do _that_ out of nowhere. So forcing near deadweight arms up, he opened the front door, took the winding-key, and wound the strike side one turn, just to see the weight lift a couple of inches, and to test what it would do when he withdrew the resisting force.

_Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong...!_ Once again, the clock began striking until it hit bottom, and the minute hand wasn't even near the hour or half hour strike point to explain why it had started doing so in the first place.

"Goddamn clock," he grumbled, setting off another coughing jag.

Had he been in sound condition, he might have pitched a fit then and rendered the clock broken for sure if it wasn't already -half out of fear, and half out of frustration. But Donald was feeling too weak to knock out the movement without pulling it all apart, and he was trying to regain a grip on his paranoia-driven temper. That had nearly gotten him into serious trouble and nearly ended his marriage a year ago, and the next few months were going to be weird enough without setting off that chain again.

If the clock's spring hadn't popped, something had settled -or changed in the humidity of the house -and had it off-balance with the weight. He and Libby had periodically added and removed excess weights from that clock before to keep it running right.

That was at least the logical explanation to it, but something nagging in the back of Donald's mind refused to believe that. It just didn't feel right.

He picked up the weight to examine it, and found a tuning fork taped to the back of it. That was bizarre enough, because neither he nor Libby were dumb enough to use tape on a metal clock weight, and when they had specialized disk weights for that clock that hooked onto the chain to add set gram amounts, using a tuning fork didn't make any sense either. 

Unless it was for some other reason aside from fixing the clock. That was what his paranoid side couldn't help but suspect as he unhooked the weight from the end of the chain and examined it.

Somebody who might not have done it to be dumb, but rather to purposefully confuse him as a joke. That might have also explained why whoever had taped on the tuning fork used light-weight duct tape instead of gaffer tape that would have suited the purpose better. Peeling it off and removing the tuning fork left a film of gunky, adhesive residue that would have to be cleaned sooner or later, before it caught dust and worked at tarnishing the metal.

With a sigh, Donald set the tuning fork down in the bottom of the clock and started to work up the most substantial line of adhesive gook with his thumb, and was just as soon stricken with the uncomfortable feeling of being watched. He could have sworn he saw another shadow flash across the wall, but once again, it was too quick to see, and gone by the time he took a harried glance behind himself.

It didn't help, he realized, that the clock weight free of its chain resembled the very item for which the band was named, and the method by which he was attempting -and failing as miserably as his physical condition felt -to clean it up, looked rather suggestive. Which only further fueled the paranoia that he was being watched. Any joke he would make over it would have ordinarily been between himself and Walter only.

Resigning to clean the clock weight properly when he was in better condition, Donald turned around again, and looking up, whether it was the combination of fever with the phenomenon of inanimate objects resembling human faces at times, or if the clock was as possessed as it appeared to be, he could have sworn it _winked_ at him. Lack of eyes be damned, _something_ shifted between just to the outside of the Roman numeral eleven, and the sane part of his mind hadn't imagined it. Nor did it imagine how truly human-like the clock seemed, with its vertical, long stature, round face up top, and the metallic ring underlining the numerals and separating the hands, resembling the upward curl of a mouth at the bottom -as it stared down at him, holding the weight, painfully out of context.

"Alright..." muttered Donald gruffly. _That_ he'd just seen would have been creepy, and worthy of fueling several nightmares over the next few days of illness. Except the offset hands on the clock face -not quite symmetrically spaced around the four and the eight -almost made it appear to have an all-too-familiar smirk that made his own lip curl up reflexively. One that confirmed the hallucinated wink was beside a simple, friendly one.

"You're kidding me. Very funny." _Very funny to be having a discussion with a clock too._ He hooked the weight back on the end of the chain to hang in its proper place. Another single-wind test set the clock running properly again, and Donald went to set the tuning fork back on the piano where it belonged before making his way back up the stairs, questioning if he'd crossed the line at which he could willingly admit the hospital was a good idea when the allusive shadow flickered along the wall to follow him once more.

But even going onstage in his condition _-strangely enough_ -still felt more appealing than checking into the emergency room. Which was enough to make him think that any hallucinations with the clock and shadows weren't as serious as they'd been frightening.

Or perhaps hadn't been hallucinations at all.

The rest of the weeks recovering at home were just as uneventful as that day.

Physical misery, but no pain or depression. No real fear or grief.

Just a strange sense that didn't seem right, and the shadows that followed beyond his time strung out on fever.

After two more episodes with the clock for other reasons -the last of which Libby was there to witness, without noticing the accompanying shadows -a certain level of more natural paranoia set in. Not anything causing of panic or difficult to live with -just a need to look over his shoulder and question if he was really on his own.

Descending the stairs, he either went slow and kept a close watch on the clock, or went fast as possible and avoided eye contact, even when the shadows still followed.

As the tour drew near, Donald found items to pack out of place -often in comical places as with the tuning fork. Against better judgement and logic, he gave his snarky responses, sometimes aloud if he couldn't see anyone physically with him.

More often than not, he could swear he heard the familiar, deceptively friendly, condescending chuckle accompanying his response, with or without a whispered response -words indecipherable, but meaning translated instinctively by the other half of Donald's mind.

It felt strange, to not pass the snide banter before yet another tour on the road, and it was always going to be strange. As he had accepted.

And now, as it seemed, for reasons he hadn't expected. Not all of which he minded, other than the lingering question it left him, and the one he spoke that never gained a response.

_"Can you hear me?"_

The first night returning to the stage, bracing himself against the sensation of electrocution through his chest that was the stage fright he'd accepted would always be there once he'd gotten past its physically-manifesting form of the early 70s, Donald addressed the audience on his own. His greeting was as much a confession as a commitment, and one Walter might have commended as much as he would have poked fun.

"I'm wishing my partner could be here tonight, but we're going to carry on."

The crowd's respectful acknowledgement, rather than over-the-top screaming applause helped edge away some of the apprehension taking his place at the keyboards, from where he could see the void on the stage where Walter would have been.

A few snide quotes between the set, when relevant to the upcoming song did come somewhat naturally to Donald, and as the nights went on, it was easier to throw them out there without setting off repressed nerves. By the fifth night, he was wondering if he'd gotten the hang of Walter's talkative frontman duties, but couldn't be quite sure. There had to be some sensation of snide satisfaction -as he'd read from Walter at the conclusion of his rants, and he didn't think he'd felt it yet.

Particularly when he'd felt stronger snide satisfaction when they'd passed banter offstage, even when alone, when nobody was the unfortunate -if deserving -recipient of the joke.

Even more so, when _something_ told him he'd _know_ for sure when he did, and that something, he could swear came from beyond his own subconscious.

He had his suspicions after the seventh show, when not only did shadows seem to follow on his heels practically everywhere he went, but the responses to any of his own cracks of wit to himself had gone eerily silent. In the way that felt as if it was that way for the sole purpose of working his paranoid side up into a frenzy.

The power blinked in the hotel that night, and when it came back on, the room phone reset. Not only was the base blinking as the answering machine sorted itself out, but the phone itself rang twice and scared Donald out of a sound sleep. As well as the first strange dream he could recall having since his feverish conversation with Walter -except this time, he was in the studio in 1974. 

It was one of those days that must have either been toward the beginning or the end of the recording period, because it was one that they were playing around and acting like hooligans. And in that instant, whatever they were doing as part of some joke to confuse Gary Katz, Walter had gone off and disappeared -long enough that Donald had resorted to trying to find him, wherever the _hell_ he was.

He hadn't found him yet when he snapped out of it, just as unceremoniously by different means than the last time.

Once the phone stopped acting up and Donald came to his senses, he wondered if he was going insane in a more functional form than in past experiences, or if he really was still looking for Walter, even knowing for over a month he wouldn't find him.

It was the eighth and final show that answered one question he had, and made him question his last thought before waiting out the rest of that night.

What had started out hardly different than the shows before it quickly took a detour as Donald became aware of a rowdy guest in the theater, who was perhaps too much volume and not enough brain.

The applause after Dirty Work was just beginning to settle down, and a faint shout of "fuck the Danettes!" rang out to the left side of the auditorium by Donald's perspective. 

That on its own might have flown with Donald's doubly-fragile patience. Looking at it from certain snide angles might have made it funny, even if obnoxious.

But then, after the faintest, lingering claps were dying off and Donald was attempting to start the internal count-off for "Bodhisattva", loud whistling cut through clear to the stage from the same direction, and _that_ did him in.

"Yeah..." he sneered toward that _one_ person who just _had_ to be that way. Making desperate, foolish, grasps for attention, and making it all about them. And of all times, not just on a the tour in honor so soon after -when it was that much more aggravatingly disrespectful than it would have been most nights -but going into possibly the most difficult start-off of any song to be played in the set too.

Despite the nerves of being thrown from his focus and careful, internal counting, a smirk nearly foreign to such moments onstage for himself caught his mouth in a sensation of being nearly possessed, and he felt himself recover the rhythm as someone else was counting it behind him with flickers of shadows over the keys. The side of the stage where the completion of the response should have come from remained silent and gapingly empty.

So he finished his thought, forceful and with as much clear articulation between syllables he could remember having uttered outside of singing onstage.

"...You fuckin' idiot."

A low, amused murmur rippled through the crowd, and Donald smirked with a satisfied toss of his head to punctuate the downbeat before taking off into the keyboard riff.

The thought rang out in his mind, as if it were being spoken behind him -so much that he practically felt that someone was standing there -_what a shame_ it was that from the stage angle, he'd been unable to see the reaction of the one he'd told off, when practically all the rest of the same audience that wracked his nerves seemed to be on his side in that moment.

_Oh, I see. I've got it now._

_So I was on point in my prediction. Of COURSE you do._

By the end of the song, not only had Donald concluded that he'd found the meaning of a stage rant -if a short one -but that in some form other than the unattainable one he wished for and missed each night, Walter was indeed with him.

That left him with the question of how the haunting form of Walter would manifest long-term in his life.

He suspected he'd begin to find out when he got home.

...........

Dreams weren't a part of it anymore. It took Donald a month after the end of the tour to decide that, in combination with the time during and preceding the tour in which Walter hadn't shown up. 

It made sense. His subconscious had more or less accepted the ending of that chapter of his life, with the exception of how weird it still felt at times. He also knew that Walter was, in some form or another, around to haunt him, and having come to that conclusion, Walter didn't need to make bigger grasps at his attention for the side of his brain still tuned to his mental frequency for him to decipher it. However much of that dream was in fact Walter announcing his existence, and not driven by fever.

Donald did suppose there was a chance of another dream, should he get a fever again, but trying to get one by anything other than living long enough to naturally contract some other illness wasn't something he'd plan to do even if it _wasn't_ grossly stupid.

The shadows that followed him in the furthest corners of his peripheral vision were a near constant whenever Walter was there. 

He found out over a few month's time that Walter's sporadic spells of silence were part of his ways of throwing him off. Just long enough to get him down off his guard, but never long enough to get him truly worried. Typically, his silence only went up to two weeks, and rarely that. Once, he'd tried three weeks, which was long enough to get Donald wondering where he was, and even stopping occasionally when moving about the house on his own to see if he could catch the quick-moving shadow.

But Walter made his reappearance before it could throw him into a bad state of mind, and if that was going to be the extent of the uncertainty, Donald supposed he could live with it. It was fitting of Walter, if nothing else.

Walter had been silent and non-existent for roughly nine days when Donald was in his home office, in the thick of dealing with legal papers being emailed in every day while preparing for a couple of one-off reunion shows with as the Dukes of September, to get back in gear for summer touring with Steely Dan on his own. This time, for a long haul he suspected would test if he could carry on by himself.

He'd slid from the desk chair to the edge of the piano while reading a new note from the road management, seeking the surface he'd become more accustomed to for easier focus. Halfway through reading, he was only beginning to notice it had gotten eerily quiet -despite the hum of the old computer's fans and the radio in the background -and the light coming in through the window had shadowed over.

A crash of the piano's bass notes rang out. 

Had Donald's reflexes been as good as they'd been in his younger days, he surely would have catapulted himself off the bench and into the next room, to slowly creep back over and see to it that nothing dangerous was lurking before returning to his compositions.

That was, assuming it was a time which he had _thought_ he was alone.

There were times which he and Walter sat writing together. Walter would wait until Donald was looking away to pull his stunt of suddenly slamming his hand down on the lowest keys of the piano. There had been a few times in which Donald had gotten too absorbed in a jam to notice an attempted input, which resulted in such an act to snap him out of it. Regardless if he was doing it with purpose, or just to mess with Donald, without failure, Donald would jump a foot in the air and let loose some scathing remark. To which Walter would snicker over how easily he startled. That often escalated to Donald attempting to retaliate by reaching to hook a finger around a bass or guitar string -whichever Walter happened to have with him at the moment.

_'See how YOU like it when I reach in like that!'_

The innuendos Walter always managed to quip out at that move, asking what Donald was trying to suggest by that, brought the house down every time, and the argument to a close.

_"I bet you can't TOP that,"_ he often finished, to which Donald resigned to agree, often after having been reduced to the laughter only a select few people could pull from him.

This time, Donald huffed out a sigh and turned around. By all logic, it couldn't have been Walter, whoever or whatever had done it. But somehow, without physical form, he had.

On the lower keys of his piano was a small, picture-book sized binder, in an upturned position on its spine, having toppled off the shelf above.

In it were all the joke-letters Walter had written from Libby's point of view. All the letters that had ended with them collapsing in chairs or sprawled on the floor laughing like few people could.

This time, Donald smirked.

"Nice one, Walt."

He wasn't sure why he found himself saying the thought aloud, but it seemed right as he flipped open the book to the first letter tucked in a plastic sleeve.

How many of those very letters he'd mentioned in his public tribute message the day after Walter's death, and he'd forgotten how so many of them went. But from the beginning of the first one, he could hear Walter reading, altering his voice into a higher, more feminine sneer, and with the shadows in the room, he might as well have been standing directly behind Donald and reading them.

"I haven't laughed in a _long time,"_ Donald mused to himself, flipping through the binder and feeling his sides ache. He hadn't laughed wholeheartedly, at least. Not out of pure enjoyment, without some condescending accompaniment.

_This doesn't have to be the end of this collection,_ echoed that same voice from within Donald had heard on the stage, that seemed to originate from somewhere other than his own mind, in some distant, mental connection. 

_That told, I can't write them myself. Not from the subject of these. I've already had my turn, and I expect to see yours. Send them off to yourself. I'm sure they'll come in handy when the case starts giving you headaches. If it hasn't already, of course._

"I was gonna say, I think it already _did."_

_Doesn't grief just bring the best out of us all?_

Donald groaned as he heard the computer sound some alarm. Either it was an error or another emailed legal document, and somewhere along the line, as the computers grew more advanced, they'd hit a peak level of intuitive navigation, and had since become less sensible for the sake of meaningless aesthetics.

"Yeah, and I thought the way I acted in the 80s was being in rare form," he grumbled, chasing through the four steps to get past the email document preview, pull up the actual file, and go through the dialogue box asking for parameters for the printer -because apparently, it was still necessary to specify black and white vs color printing when the document was all black and white. By the time it was actually set to print, Donald was practically forgetting about the contents of the document itself and beginning to think up whatever crack he'd have made to Walter over who was dumb enough to need a computer coded in a way twice as complicated to understand.

But then the printer tried to pull in the last two sheets of paper in the tray at once, and it jammed. Luckily, it stopped soon enough that it only caught the very edge. Clearing the jam didn't require taking the printer apart, fighting to pull the sheets out from the roller only to extract crumpled ribbons, and then having a second fight trying to figure out how to put it back together. All it took was a quick pull, opening and closing the top to reset the error code, and putting in a fresh stack of paper with a moderate amount of grumbled profanities.

It did make rips on the one end though, and left Donald with two sheets of paper that were inappropriate for use with any formal purpose, but mostly intact and plenty useful otherwise.

Before him were the updated legal documents now emerging in the drying tray, the binder of forged play-letters, and the two sheets of paper that were becoming more and more tempting.

A quick glance back at the piano, and he noticed a pen laying across the keys he hadn't recalled being there before. He reached over and picked it up, and pulled one of the two messed-up papers.

_Oh, what the hell. I guess it won't hurt to try my hand at it..._

It _was_ very cathartic, Donald decided later. Perhaps it wasn't as in-character to Walter's widow as Walter's imitations were of Libby. But it was a satisfying parody of the summarized complaints he was receiving through the legal documents that were his current source of aggravation. 

Maybe they'd even save him from saying something in formal response he'd regret.

As for Walter's haunting involvement in it... Donald decided he didn't want to open that can of worms by questioning it. He'd find out if there was truly a problem, and he would regret taking unpredictable haunting and allowing it to bring back old paranoia.

_Paranoid of becoming paranoid. How about THAT?_ He watched as the shadows slipped away from the room as if to disappear with the faked letter when he stowed it away in the binder.

_Hope you're with me on this too -at least to some point._

Another two-week span of silence, and through the first stage of traveling to shows was enough to make Donald start to wonder if Walter indeed _wasn't_ with him and hadn't meant everything he'd suggested in the fever dream about carrying on.

He made his grand return -and the opposite known during soundcheck. This time, it wasn't anything symbolic or truly geared toward Donald himself. With no warning, and no visible explanation whatsoever, a drink one of the crew had placed on the surface edge of the piano went flying off to cascade across the floor in a splash of liquid and broken glass.

Donald didn't have much explanation until he happened for why he'd had the sudden urge to look up to where it'd been set. Nobody had called his name so that he'd consciously heard, but as soon as he'd looked up, he saw the glass topple over -in the same way it would have if the headstock of a guitar had simply been reached over to hook around it and knock it over the edge. Almost like a snide cat would tease its owner, hooking its paw around an item placed temptingly in a vulnerable place.

Instantly, Donald knew. He was starting to get used to such occurrences. Enough that it didn't get as big a reaction out of him as it might have a few months prior. 

The reemergence of Walter's activity had pulled the plug on his rising stage fright too, so the relief of that kept him unfazed by little more than the sudden, sharp noise of breaking glass catching the multi-directional stage microphones -all of which were turned up for testing.

It _did_ get a rise out of Michael McDonald though, and that might have been more funny than it was, had Walter been physically there to crack a verbal joke and discreetly snicker over it.

He would have found it amusing to some point for sure. 

Maybe he still did.

"Cleanup, _please!"_ Mike shouted to the road crew, watching the liquid spreading across the wooden stage floor toward the electronics and the edges of area rugs put down. "Cleanup, please! _Quickly!_ Somebody toss me something to stop that from spreading! And just out of curiosity, did anyone _see_ how that happened?"

Watching as one of the roadies threw Mike a towel and ran off to get something to properly clean up the mess, Donald bowed over the piano and struck another test chord to hide his amused snort and smirk -for his own benefit, if at the expense of losing a chance to further embarrass Mike. Seeing a big, burly member of the road crew get pissed off was still just as terrifying as it had been decades ago in his paranoia-stricken days -and went serious as he heard the sound of faint chuckling behind him where nobody visibly stood.

The rest of that quick set of shows was uneventful, aside from minor hotel hijinks, a few misplaced items backstage every few nights, and the last day on the drive from the hotel to the venue. Donald was riding in the car with Mike and Boz Scaggs down the middle lane of I-95 North, when the familiar shadows seemed to descend upon the vehicle despite the sun outside the windows. 

Then the left back door came unlatched and went flying open as they were moving at 70 miles per hour.

That startled Mike _again_, though Donald didn't find it nearly as funny as it happened, being a potentially-dangerous matter that gave him plenty of paranoia-inducing mental images. He strongly empathized with Boz, who was sitting in the left back seat, swearing and growling the whole time he held the handle and fought the wind current from opening it further. At least for the three seconds before the driver dove through a gap between cars in the right lane to screech to a halt in the shoulder lane so they could put the door back.

Later that evening, imagining what the car looked like from the outside and the thoughts of everyone beside the car in the left lane -particularly the driver of the car almost directly next to them who must have nearly shit a brick while Boz kept the door from denting theirs -was more amusing.

However, when the nightmares came in early the next morning of Walter's worst encounter with a car on a road -that had ultimately started over half a decade of immense pain -it left Donald with an uneasy feeling that didn't leave him on his journey home.

_Are you crazy?_ he wondered the whole time he was setting up for the quick, week-long turnaround before going back out with Steely Dan on his own.

He didn't know anymore whether he was asking that to Walter or himself. The second half of the phrase, he could at least know was only aimed at the director of his haunting.

_Are you HIGH?_

Supposing the car was symbolic of anything, if it was possible for a ghost in whatever form Walter had taken, maybe he was.

Or maybe that was part of the ordinary haunting he just hadn't gotten to yet.

Only time would tell. And the fear of uncertainty descended once again. Perhaps worse than right after Walter's death. 

Not as bad as decades before. But by the third night -and a week of silence and no shadows, Donald was feeling the emptiness on the stage more than he had in the Fall as he delivered the same opening he had then, with a larger, public confession as he looked on to the extra, empty microphone stand someone on the road crew had accidentally put up on auto-pilot from previous years.

An unused microphone that was going to be there every night forward -he'd make sure of it.

"I wish my partner could have been here tonight. He's not going to be here -he's just not."

_Not in the same way, at least._

"We sure miss him."

The same respectful silence -and had the shadow crept in by that microphone? Or was it the stage lights?

With a brief toss of his head, as if to shake off the thought, Donald turned back and asked a question with a subtle sneer -_it was_ indeed getting easier to pull off the frontman duties.

"No one likes jazz, do they?"

He wore a more pleased smirk when some of the crowd did respond enthusiastically, before shrugging with a sidelong glance toward that shadow as he handed off "Dirty Work" to the Danettes, almost as with old days.

_Guess you all aren't too bad,_ he thought to himself of the audience as he played, and the receptiveness began backing the nerves that rose every evening down to a negligible level.

No, carrying it on wasn't dirty work and phoning it in. It was an honorable mission -difficult, but far less taxing than one from the past.

One he could live with for some time.

That night, one of the road crew cornered him with a small, yellow envelope -which looked similar to those that legal papers were stored in, and the sight nearly made Donald's stomach turn.

"I was just about ready to say tonight wasn't as bad as I expected -or maybe now that you're here, _so I thought._ NOW what?"

The roadie held up his hands.

"It's not what it looks like -promise. Just put it in something to protect it. I found what's in here in one of the old road cases. Don't know when it got there or how old it is, and it seems kind of odd, but I wasn't gonna throw it away until you saw it. In case it was meant to get to you at some time."

Donald sighed and took the envelope, before heading to the car, being gracious enough to grumble about seeing the roadie at the airport the next day. The next set of shows was far enough away to require excessive transit hassles in between.

Once the door to yet another hotel room was shut for the night, he unclipped the yellow envelope -still stiff and free of wrinkles, providing some reason to trust that the roadie had indeed pulled it out of an office supply pack rather than receiving it from the mail -and reached inside.

What his hand came into contact with was too flexible and soft for paper, but painfully familiar. The only difference was rather than placing the cocktail napkin into the envelope, he was taking it out.

_'Don,_

_In the event you end up questioning it rather than me, we already once found before that the best of music doesn't really die, does it?'_

Walter's signature was scrawled below, unmistakable even with the slight blur not entirely from tiredness creeping on the very edges of Donald's vision, along with a sense of an answer he'd given up on ever getting within a month of reunion.

"Yes, _you're_ sly," he muttered, wondering when in the string of the last couple of years, as Walter's self-deprecating jokes toward his declining health had run rampant, just when had he stashed that napkin so that nobody would know to look for it until he was gone. 

_And probably as ordinary as you've been in a few years too._

No question remained that the receiving end of an old connection had come back around and finally gotten to him.

Had he stored it in his checked luggage, or in his carry-on? By the time he was on the plane the next day, he'd forgotten.

_Doesn't really matter where it is when I know what was on it,_ he decided, noting the shadow taking its place along the wall of the plane, extending slightly onto the base of the overhead compartment to loom ever-present above him.

Just a shadow, and never the same, but strangely still there in meaning.

_That_ had been what had happened to all the efforts of the 80s.

_Now I see what you did._ Subconsciously, Donald found himself silently mouthing the words he silently passed on.

"Pssst!"

Walter chuckled, unbeknownst to anyone else on the plane as Donald flinched and looked across the aisle to meet a concerned Steve Winwood with a perturbed expression.

"Well, what do _you_ want?"

"Couldn't tell if you looked like something was bothering you there a second. _Feelin' alright?"_

_Winwood's a fine performer, but has always been to innocent for my liking,_ Donald thought silently to himself once again -and to the shadow on the wall of the plane channeling thoughts in that other half of his mind.

_Begs the question if he could survive a session. Pity, we'll never know, when those days are gone forever._

_Guess he's lucky I don't see fit to give him too hard of a time. Except a little confusion you've helped with, just to embarrass him._

"I'm actually feeling quite good myself," he quipped aloud in response.

To which Steve raised an eyebrow, still concerned, and confused, but sat back without questioning it further. Donald clearly knew something he didn't, and whatever it was wasn't his territory.

Indeed, his response wasn't quite the truth, and never would be entirely. It didn't seem right, even after a strung-out night of connecting the loose ends left hanging for decades, creating new ones that would never close in Walter's physical absence -which Donald would know the rest of his own living life.

But for the uncertainty of the wildly inconsistent and disorienting presence Donald hadn't anticipated to live with, was undeniably characteristic of Walter, from the time he was with him in the studio, partnering to hassle every bandmate and session member with the joking only the two of them could understand.

And for all the times the haunting caught him off guard, by the end of this tour, just as he'd slowly learned the ways of the ranting frontman, he'd figure out how to use the haunting to confuse whoever was splitting the ticket with The Dan -and he'd find out in the process whether or not Walter had done all that he could do.

Likely not.

The faint echo over the plane engines once again told Donald who was with him, and could hear him too.

_Of course, you will._


End file.
